Japanese court overturns Red RAW video patent

dannyw

Thank god. The actual patent (roughly; I researched it myself, but a few years ago so memory fuzzy) involves compressing frames/video before debayering which makes the streams more easily compressible; instead of after debayering, and as part of a camera (internal RAW). Yeah.

dabinat

> One possibility the abolition of the license fees reportedly due to Red from users of Apple’s ProRes RAW codec. This would be great but I’m not going to hold my breath.

wmf

This is a terrible patent (it's basically a list of features) and unfortunately Red was able to milk it for almost 20 years.

grokcodec

I've been waiting for this result for a long time - great news!!

looksjjhg

Wow that’s big!

Wistar

In the past 15 years, I have purchased five Lumix cameras including the new L10 (which I have yet to receive). I like their cameras a lot. The dedication to pursue this battle is another reason I am certain to buy more.

decimalenough

Can somebody give a ELI5 of what "RAW video" actually is? I was always under the impression that it's just a dump of the "raw" uncompressed and uncorrected data coming from the sensors, meaning it's hardware dependent and unstandardized, and Wikipedia seems to agree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format So what exactly is patentable here? Or is this the bone of contention here?

jujube3

If it was filed in 2008, wouldn't the patent have expired in 2028 anyway? Or am I missing something?

strogonoff

"Raw” is not an acronym.

panny

Patents last at most 20 years. So the troll got 18 years out of it, and a great expense to the public and many companies involved fighting it. Trolls and lawyers win again. Everyone else loses.